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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

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Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#661

Post by ageofwant »

Yhippa wrote: post #599
LeanderK wrote: post #45

I am worried that a company as important to the open-source community as github is now owned by one of the major players. I think it really impacts the neutrality of github. If I would compete with microsoft in a certain space, I would really think twice about relying on github. Also, this monopolization is driving me mad.

Why did the F/OSS community put all their eggs in one basket? Hell a lot of big companies did also. I wonder how they're going to react to this?

Probably because its fairly low-risk. I have ~270 Github repos. About a year ago I made a ~5 line Python script that added Gitlab as another origin to each repo. I still use (used) Gitlab as my main host, I'm a paying customer - but for me to flick over to Gitlab is a one-liner.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#662

Post by krick »

zeth___ wrote: post #399
parvenu74 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Gates is playing international philanthropist; Ballmer is playing NBA owner. The new regime not only likes open source and contribute massively to open source projects, they joined the Linux Foundation at the _Platinum_ level... there are a lot of "good open source companies" with deep pockets who haven't done that. Like Google. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-relea…

>And... what has Microsoft done to you lately? Skype.

Funny enough, I don't feel that way about Skype anymore. Yeah, Microsoft destroyed it, but, on the other hand, why did I even use it? Right, because there was nothing else back then, and Skype was "good enough". And everyone else was using it. Even though, honestly, it always was some buggy proprietary piece of shit, dragging all that legacy of the Delphi era into 201x. If anything, it may be even good it's not so dominant anymore, even though we still don't have anything decent to completely replace it.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#663

Post by koolba »

neckardt wrote: post #474
st26 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity. The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of…

I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up. The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make i…

Eh? It’s literally three shell commands to install GitLab. One to add their GPG key, one to add the upstream repo, and one to apt-get install the package. I bet there’s a curl | bash script to do all three as “one step”.

If you’re going to complain about something, at least pick something legit like managing backups or server uptime. The install itself couldn’t be simpler.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#665

Post by jacques_chester »

st26 wrote: post #353
nyxtom wrote: post #197

It's interesting that the HN community continues to make reference to the prospect of a decentralized internet when Git was built to be decentralized in the first place. In spite of this, we all have congregated around GitHub for the community and are shocked when the centralized source we've been using gets acquired by a company we don't trust. That's sort of the whole point of centralization, you can't trust it. Ma…

Centralization has an undeniable fundamental attraction. Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization, and then major scandals reverse the trend. We will probably swing back and forth between the two in perpetuity. The whole darn internet was built to be decentralized. And yet we all use GMail, the same handful of DNS servers, the same short list of major trunk hubs, the same shrinking list of…

> Everything, really, seems to naturally trend towards centralization,

It's economics 101, really: division of labour and economies of scale. A company like Github can build and sustain capabilities that are flatly uneconomical for their customers to build themselves.

In terms of strategy, Github's lockin doesn't come from git. It comes from everything around it: issues, pull requests etc. This functionality can be replicated, but data has inertia. The more you have, the less you want to move it.

For an instructive parallel, consider how easy it is to use AWS Lambda with all of AWS's data-centric services.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#666

Post by gerdesj »

chrisan wrote: post #576
gerdesj wrote: post #503

Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty fr…

Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof There’s a reason MS bought GitHub and not GitLab

Perhaps Linus should have knocked together all the other things GitHub created/glued together, or more importantly grown such a large community under a single roof

Linus invented git because Linux needed a new code repo thingie. He was only focused on one project - Linux. He released git as GPL. GitHub n Co are value add sites with fees for services and are more than welcome to use GPL software for obvious reasons.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#667

Post by mhartl »

As [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella increasingly moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.

If you told me ten years ago that someday Microsoft would buy GitHub as part of its strategy to do "more in-house development on Linux", I'd have assumed the acquisition was announced on April 1.

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#668

Post by ageofwant »

I'm a paying Github customer, I'm very uncomfortable with giving Microsoft any money. Not after what they have done to me. Not after what they have done to my friends, and my family. Time heals all wounds they say, but fool me twice...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI

Re: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub

#669

Post by gerdesj »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #539
gerdesj wrote: post #503

Soooo .... Linus Torvalds knocks together a code repo thingie a few years back because Bit Keeper became a bit too non free (nice one Tridge P) and calls it Git. Git is specifically designed not to need centralisation. It turns out that git is not just for Linux and can be used to manage lots of software development. A few companies spring up with some paid for value add stuff - mainly centralisation with a pretty fr…

You'll be surprised to learn who has is primarily sponsoring git's development for the past years. (It's Google.)

Aye:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano

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